Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday July 14, 2009 @03:16AM
from the pulling-a-duke dept.

Quantic Dream has announced that their much-anticipated thriller Heavy Rain is being pushed back to 2010. Co-CEO Guillaume de Fondaumiere said that the game is on-time and on-budget, but also that they don't want it to come out at the same time as many other high-profile games. "Most publishers today realize that it's not ideal to release a new IP or a new genre just before Christmas. It's a very crowded place to be, and certain games need more space to live their life. Everybody at working on the project, both at Quantic and Sony, believe this is the right time." Meanwhile, Take-Two announced that BioShock 2 would be delayed as well, backing off from their October 30th EU release date and saying it will come out during the "first half of calendar 2010."

Bioshock was not that good of a game. It removed the best parts of System Shock, consolised the gameplay and removed any challenge to the player.

Bioshock had no replay value as both choices you could have made led to exactly the same ending. There was no need to ever alter your style of play as you could carry every weapon and every power in the game at once and there were two or three over powered attacks which made it pointless to use anything else, not that it mattered as you simply just couldn't die no matter what you did. 2K completely removed any RPG elements and dumbed down the FPS elements in order to make the game accessable to consoles. If Bioshock 1 is any indication on how Bioshock 2 will turn out I'm not holding my breath for it.

Bioshock was not that good of a game. It removed the best parts of System Shock, consolised the gameplay and removed any challenge to the player.

Bioshock had no replay value as both choices you could have made led to exactly the same ending. There was no need to ever alter your style of play as you could carry every weapon and every power in the game at once and there were two or three over powered attacks which made it pointless to use anything else, not that it mattered as you simply just couldn't die no matter what you did. 2K completely removed any RPG elements and dumbed down the FPS elements in order to make the game accessable to consoles. If Bioshock 1 is any indication on how Bioshock 2 will turn out I'm not holding my breath for it.

I have to agree with that. Choices in a game can be meaningful if they impact the game, somehow. But ending movies? Do they really think I'm going to play through the entire game again just to see a different 30 seconds of badly rendered movie?

Meaningful choices could include keeping one weapon and dropping another, but as you say, you can carry everything with you all the time. Replay value could also have been increased by experimenting with different powers, but again, you can already do that on your first playthrough so why bother?

Ultimately Bioshock was not a bad game, but it was not a successor to System Shock in any way. Instead it was a highly polished, very pretty Doom-clone. And since I've had enough of those by now, I won't be shelling out for part 2.

I agree, but the same can be said for most modern games. You can't fail, there is no real death or setback. Most games have a low difficulty factor and even if you do die there is no real penalty. As a result the modern games play out like animated movies.
In an effort to reduce a players frustration the big game houses have produced games that offer no challenge and therefore no feeling of accomplishment / reward for completing the game. Ever complete Ghosts n Goblins ? that made you feel good, not everyone can do it without cheats.
Three lives sparingly added to and not recovered at the end of each level. If you die - give the player a choice to give up an inventory item (as if you were mugged) or go back to the beginning of a level- make it a penalty of some kind.
I stopped playing single player games for this very reason, out smarting a human player is a better challenge, though people in games become predictable after a while too. At least when you fail in a MP game it is a good honest failure.... you lose .

Bioshock was a competent game. It's biggest problem was that it had been massively over-sold. On the gameplay front, it was supposed to be the spiritual successor to System Shock 2, which, as you and others have noted, it wasn't. On the story front, it was supposed to set new standards for depth and intelligence in game story-telling. In truth, it wasn't anything like as clever as it thought it was, failing to rise above the level of pseudo-sophistication I'd expect from an overconfident political sciences undergraduate. The element of moral choice was so black and white as to be ludicrous; you could either be an angel or a demon, with nothing in between. If you want to see moral choices done properly, then turn to Fallout 3, not to Bioshock.

The gameplay was effectively a run and gun shooter with a few irritating-but-easy puzzle minigames and a bit of spellcasting thrown in. I don't actually blame console-ification for this; you can actually have some excellent, deep gameplay on the consoles. I think it was related more to lazy design and a serious underestimation of the capabilities of the target audience.

Of course, it was still a reasonable game, considered on its own terms. The combat was moderately fun, though it suffered from some balance issues that generally encouraged players to be very conservative in their combat tactics, ignoring the more creative ways of using the environment and the plasmids. Visually it was pretty nice, with the art deco theme being generally well realised.

So yes, not actively bad, but if they want to get me excited about a sequel, they need to make clear that they're going to be much more ambitious this time around.

I thought it was a decent game; good graphics, excellent atmosphere and really well choreographed scenes & story telling. I've not played System Shock 2, but you can't deny it was good fun. Playing it the 2nd time round is worth doing too; noticing stuff that's explained later on is good fun too - a bit like watching The Matrix the 2nd time round; suddenly everything's much clearer.

It's a well-established and much storied fact that any game, no matter how good, can get totally fucked by the Christmas rush. Pick up a back issue of MCV or Edge and you'll find plenty of rueful developers and publishers discussing how their hundred-million-dollar project simply did not sell because the top three slots were occupied by that year's EA Sports titles and a new GTA. Essentially, the game has to sell within a three month window, and if that window is occupied by six must-haves already, then everything is screwed. Even the must haves are screwed because only a small minority of gamers head out and buy a half-dozen titles in a single quarter. It becomes a lottery. No long tail exists for games retail, so once that chaotic launch window has passed, those games are off the shelves and it's all over.

I think the best of these comes in the second downloadable content pack, "The Pitt". I'm about to spoiler this massively, so those who haven't yet played this, but think they might do so, look away now.

Okay, you might be right. I haven't played "The Pitt" because I've been waiting for the chance to buy it without dealing with Microsoft Points. And I didn't read the rest of you message because of the spoiler warning!

They had a crack at introducing moral ambiguity into that when you meet the first little sister - Atlas warns you that there are lives at stake and that the little sister isn't a real child, so you ought to kill her (a monster) so you can survive yourself and save his family. It's not presented as black-and-white which is the best choice in that first decision. Beyond that they didn't make you think about it so much and there was very little penalty to saving them in the rest of the game. They could have worked harder at that aspect.